4 ms·
I've been saying from day one that Stadia should have offered a subscription service similar to what Microsoft is doing with Game Pass. I don't want to pay ful
by ascagnel_ 5y ago
I've been saying from day one that Stadia should have offered a subscription service similar to what Microsoft is doing with Game Pass. I don't want to pay full-price for games that require someone else maintaining hardware, especially when they're not booking any recurring revenue.
- sbarre 5y agoGoogle would have struggled to get a catalogue for their subscription I think, if only because they had to convince publishers (some that would consider Stadia to be competition) to put in work to get games running on their platform. I wonder if they tried the subscription thing first but then gave up and just went with the buy model as a least-worst choice at a point in the cycle where it was too late to back out of the whole endeavour. Stadia uses custom hardware so games can't just run on Stadia as-is, they have to be ported, which requires investment from the game's developers (or a porting shop). I have to imagine most publishers that Google approached expected them to foot some of the bill for that work, if not all of it.
- Gigachad 5y agoThe ideal solution would have been charging a fee to use stadia and then just letting people link their steam account in. You still buy the games at full price, Google still gets paid, and you keep the games after they shut down.
- sbarre 5y agoYes, that's exactly GeForce Now's model, but since Stadia uses custom hardware and requires work to port games over (a huge mistake in my mind), it would still not have worked to just bring in Steam. They should have gone with standard hardware basically.